"Abramoff is someone who we don't know a lot about. We know what we read in the paper."
Ken Mehlman on his White House dealings with Jack Abramoff. After it was revealed Abramoff had over 400 email exchanges with the White House.
"I was a gateway," Mehlman said in an interview. "It was my job to talk to political supporters, to hear their requests, and hand them on to policymakers."
It's amazing how emails can suddenly give a political operative total recall. Word around the media is that Abramoff had Mehlman shitcan Allen Stayman from the State Department. (It's always interesting to see lobbyists help decide foreign policy matters.) Mehlman is having memory loss problems again. I wonder if he remembers those U2 tickets he requested and received from Abramoff.
Ethics rules prohibit officials from accepting gifts worth more than $20 from a person doing business with the government, although there are exceptions. Ethics officials typically consider such suite tickets to be worth the same as the event's most expensive tickets, which in this case was $133 apiece, according to Waxman's office.
Surely, Mehlman remembers seeing the concert in Abramoff's suite.
"I've been to several U2 concerts, but I don't know whether I went to that one," he said. "But I can tell you that as political director I was always very careful to make sure everything I did was above board and consistent with the rules."
In politics, this is called the Ronald Reagan defense.
"It's like I wasn't president at all."
Ronald Wilson Reagan to Iran-contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh.
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